Judging from the newly launched footage — which you’ll be able to watch beneath — the Contact-And-Go (TAG) pattern assortment occasion seems to have been a hit.
The footage reveals OSIRIS-REx making contact with Bennu the place the spacecraft instantly fires into the asteroid’s floor to gather samples, sparking a particles cloud.“The sampling occasion introduced the spacecraft all the best way right down to pattern web site Nightingale, and the crew on Earth acquired affirmation of profitable landing at 6:08 pm EDT,” based on NASA.
“Preliminary information present the sampling head touched Bennu’s floor for about 6 seconds, after which the spacecraft carried out a back-away burn.”
The asteroid mission made a large number — and that is a very good factor. “We really did kind of make a mess on the surface of this asteroid. Nevertheless it’s a very good mess,” OSIRIS-REx principal investigator Dante Lauretta, of the College of Arizona, knowledgeable the press. “It is the form of mess we had been hoping for.”
One of many a number of causes why NASA selected Bennu was due to its primordial origins. As NASA defined: “Bennu is a leftover fragment from the tumultuous formation of the photo voltaic system. A number of the mineral fragments inside Bennu may very well be older than the photo voltaic system. These microscopic grains of mud may very well be the identical ones that spewed from dying stars and ultimately coalesced to make the Solar and its planets almost 4.6 billion years in the past.”
Meteorites that strike Earth are contaminated by each their descent into our environment and the weather that they are uncovered to for years. Going straight to the supply, if you’ll, presents astronomers the possibility to check the traditional origins of life.
OSIRIS-REx will proceed gathering samples and mapping Bennu earlier than starting its return mission to Earth in March 2021. It’s anticipated to land again within the U.S. in 2023.
For extra science protection, uncover why there’s a 50-50 chance we really are living in a simulation, how paradox-free time-travel is possible, and why these scientists have “no intention of raising dinosaurs.”
